the_mysterious_mr_enterfandomcom-20200214-history
Criticism
It's been a busy month for me in many spheres - one of those "Trying to figure things out" kind of months. And I've been given a lot of disjointed thoughts that I don't know how to express, based on a variety of topics. So pardon if this feels like disjointed rambling at some point. And a lot of it is just general complaining at the wind with my own frustrations. Imagine that you go to a restaurant and you order something, let's say the steak. Maybe you liked it, maybe you didn't. It's really irrelevant. However, the people at the restaurant assume that every time you're going to come into the restaurant you're going to order steak. It's two years later, you've even become a vegetarian, but whenever you sit down at that restaurant they've already got the steak for you in the oven. And then they get offended when you go to some other restaurant. It sounds far-fetched and kind of random, but that's generally how I feel when I come across some of the criticism against me. Like, I've run into plenty of criticism about me that say things like "his editing is shit" or "his microphone sounds horrible" or "all he does is rant about SpongeBob"... posted like last week or something. Now, I'm not perfect, but when I find people complaining about things that I've already fixed... it's kind of disheartening. And I guess I can't really get too pissed or annoyed because if someone has stopped watching my stuff they're not going to notice any of the improvements that I've made along the way. Yeah, (most of) the old videos are still around, but trust me, if I remove any of them, they'll be back up. The "worse" the video is, the faster someone else will upload it. When I started, I wasn't "taking this seriously." On some level, that's a part of the appeal of a YouTube/internet personality. It's like talking to someone in general conversation and not a teacher or someone that feels like they're in an ivory tower. You know, when James Rolfe and Doug Walker started "taking this seriously" they upped their production and it caused a lot of people to lose interest. I'm not saying this as an excuse, or even an explanation really. It's hard to know what you have that helps you connect with an audience, and because you can't tell what it is, it makes you wonder about each and every move. People will tell me to "not be so angry" and other people will tell you that they like it when I rage and there are a lot of conflicting messages, and it's hard to know what is and isn't a vocal minority among my own viewers. No one goes into making YouTube videos, expecting anything to happen. This is a common thread that anyone will tell you. I have had issues with criticism in the past, and I continue to have them. It doesn't help that there have been genuine assholes poisoning the well, which make it tempting to just shut it out and not listen to anyone. I'd say names, but I can't say names, and I'm sure plenty of people have heard the names. I feel like I'm the only person in the world who has a hatedom who had prominent members get their own hatedom. Honestly it's kind of bizarrely interesting to watch from a distance, watching some of these people turn on each other. I objectively know that I'm not the only person to have prominent "haters" that have haters of their own. It's just... weird. I get criticism that I will say I genuinely find stupid. Like, there was this person who complained that I was reviewing obscure things. No really, that's the whole thing. I think it came up because I reviewed an episode from The Garbage Pail Kids, that I was a hypocrite or something for saying that I want animation to be better by reviewing bad things that were forgotten or unknown. You know, because there's absolutely nothing that we can learn from The Garbage Pail Kids or Little Clowns of Happytown or Doggy Poo. My favorite criticism in this category is "reviews should not be opinions." Which is more and more hilarious the more I think about it. If someone doesn't have an opinion on something; generally they don't review it. Every review is formed on the basis of an opinion. If you don't want an opinion on something; you'll have to use an encyclopedia. And I get that it's somewhere along the line of "reviewers shouldn't be biased" which is much more reasonable. Although, everyone has specific tropes and such that do tick them off and they'd think less of a work for having those tropes and to be 100% devoid of bias is impossible. When people say they want unbiased criticism, they tend to mean that they don't want the reviewers paid off or something like that, which is reasonable. I wouldn't review something that someone I personally knew made, or something that I made without being completely upfront about that. Another one I get a lot is "you're just helping people reaffirm their own opinions." Or something like "I'm just giving a voice to fan outrage." Except that I've gone against the grain plenty of times - Flapjack, Wayside (to an extent), Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi, and especially 12 Oz Mouse ''and ''Drawn Together: The Movie. And also, I did a positive episode review of Teen Titans Go, plenty of positive Spongebob episodes, and I am planning on doing something for Family Guy, after I finish washing the taste of Brian's a Bad Father out of my mouth. Even on a lesser extent, "before me" people thought that Ren Seeks Help was the best of Adult Party Cartoon, and plenty still do. I mean, I can be harsh of even very popular shows like Steven Universe and Legend of Korra. I will not hesitate to criticize them when Steven Universe puts the overall plot about a monster that could destroy the earth at any moment on pause to have a birthday party, or when Korra ends with a robot larger than a skyscraper... made of ultra-rare platinum as the grand end of power creep. I actually don't like it when people use my own opinions as theirs. I mean, it's fine if we share the same opinion, but if you're in an argument and you just link to one of my writings or reviews in lieu of an actual argument, it annoys me a lot. It annoys me when people do that to me, and it annoys me when people do that with my own arguments. Even if we both like or dislike something, we could have vastly different reasons for liking or disliking something. Some complaints and criticisms I don't think I'm ever gonna be rid of. My favorite in this category is "you do so many atrocities compared to admirables." I could tell all of my thousand reasons, but I doubt that it would make much of a difference in the overall scheme. On the business side, with very few oddball exceptions, atrocity reviews get more views; and there's time cost involved. I could be making a video I know won't do as well instead of a video that could end up like my Cadillacs and Dinosaurs review and gather less than 100k views in a couple of years. But, I'd be lying if I said that that was the only reason or the most prominent reason. Views are only as relevant to my channel as eating is to me being alive. And my being alive isn't about eating, and I don't live to eat. I eat to live. Sorry, I'm getting a little hungry right now. I've used sturgeon's law before - 90% of everything is crap. While that is a gross exaggeration, there is a lot more bad media in the world than good stuff. Actually most of the stuff tends towards the middle, mediocre and middling. It takes special kinds of effort and special kinds of talent to get to either extremes. But, I don't think that's even a good explanation. And "Atrocity" is just a brand name. As far as I've known, none of the animations I've reviewed has killed anyone in the real world. Bad pieces of media are better learning experiences than good pieces of media. Good pieces of media can be great spectacles and things full of beauty, and the world is better for them. I use the broken clock analogy a lot. A good piece of media is like a fully functional clock. If it you put this in front of someone who doesn't know anything about clock making, it'll be very hard for them to explain each individual piece and what it's supposed to do... unless you take the pieces out. Bad pieces of media are broken clocks - some of them have pieces bent out of shape; they have the wrong piece in the wrong place; they use the wrong materials; or some pieces are flat out missing. It's a lot easier to explain to people why "Peter-Assment" doesn't work when it comes to double standards, than say... "Ms Teacher Bangs a Boy" does, especially when you place the two of them next to each other. You can more clearly see the effects of failure in "Peter-Assment" and what the consequence of not following the steps taken in "Ms Teacher Bangs a Boy." It's another reason that I've avoided things like mockbusters, have weened out Spongebob reviews, and decided to stop reviewing gross-out shows. I don't think there's much I could learn from any of these things anymore. And when things are bad in the same way, I tend to make lists. Here's a more apt version of sturgeon's law - for every one way to do something right, there are a thousand ways to do something wrong. Another reason is the very concept of Admirable Animations forces it to be done less than Atrocities. I've said it many times before that I really want to avoid praising things that have infinitely been praised before. For example, even though Inside Out ''is my favorite Pixar movie, everyone else has gone on and on about that. Unless of course, I can find a new way of tackling it or a new way of looking at the product. Admirable Animation is usually reserved for the shows and movies that people might not have otherwise known existed - ''Bounty Hamster; Gregory Horror Show; Animal Crossing the Movie - or it's an attempt to get people to give something a second look and examine it from a different angle, like with BoJack Horseman or Meet the Robinsons. I'm not very proud of the reviews that I've made that just praise things that have been done to death; they don't have much purpose in hindsight. My Heart of Ice review, I'll admit is one of the things I made to cave in to fan pressure to review something that "should be praised" and as a result I ended up saying nothing of substance or value. Even if my admirables aren't as intense as Homer Badman or as polished as The Telescope, I'd like to at least have turned people on something that they didn't even know existed. People keep asking me when the third Web Animations review is going to come out, but it's really a microcosm of this. I wanted to make one that only showcases videos that have less than 1,000,000 views, although I might lessen that to 1,000,000 for the first view, and 500,000 for each subsequent year. It's... rather hard. I'd compare Admirable Animations to what the Happy Video Game Nerd used to do - take a look at cult classics and engage people to want to check them out themselves. There's more criteria than just "it's good and I like it." One accusation I've gotten is that I like ranting and riffing on bad cartoons, perhaps too much. And I gotta say, I don't always enjoy doing it. Sometimes I do have a lot of fun, I'll admit.. You'll probably notice this in shows that I choose to review a lot. Teen Titans Go and the Donkey Kong Country shows are really fun to riff. I wouldn't call them "so bad they're good" but it's something that I like critiquing because of the interesting choices made within them. (interesting =/= good or bad). I get enjoyment in figuring out the thought processes behind things like Doggy Poo or Shorty McShorts' Shorts. However, then we get to things like Family Guy. You might be able to tell this with how I talk in the review, but when I come across episodes like Brian's a Bad Father, it is genuinely an unpleasant time reviewing it. There's plenty of Adult Party Cartoons and Mega Babies and The Nutshack's and things that I want to scrub from my brain. Why do I do it? Well... people like my reviews, and it allows someone to get some kind of enjoyment out of something they otherwise wouldn't. You know, on say a YouTube upload of someone who's uploaded a bad clip/episode of a cartoon and they say "can't wait until Mr. Enter reviews this" - because on some level, I've turned something not-entertaining to someone into something entertaining for them. You know, despite my endless barrage of atrocities I do believe that good can come out of bad. My entire existence is predicated on that belief. You know, things like say... Norm of the North. It's incredibly hard to watch on its own because of the baffling decisions made throughout the entire movie. But throw in a foil and it ends up making someone somewhere laugh. Even when it comes to the more middle of the road stuff that I've reviewed - things like Wayside or'' Schnookums and Meat'' or my next review Committed - these things are all in danger of being forgotten and washed away to the either. And personally, I think that being forgotten is the absolute worst fate for any piece of media. It truly is sad when something is washed away, even like The Little Clowns of Happytown, which took - no joke - months of searching to track an episode down for reviewing. There is value in these things, usually it's "what not to do" - but it is something. Now, I'm in a weird place where I'm an internet critic that doesn't primarily focus on humor. Jokes that I tell tend to be incidental, and they're never the inception of a review. I didn't pick out something because I thought I could tell the most jokes about; I pick things out because I have things to say. My primary focus in the criticism, specifically the story and the writing. I'm a writer. It's what I do on the side; it's what I did before; and it's what I'll do after all of this is done. Why do I review cartoons? Well, as a sassy answer, it's what people watch me for. No one really picks what made them big on the internet. Sure, I originally decided to start reviewing cartoons. Actually I originally reviewed My Little Pony ''episodes; and I reviewed a couple of SpongeBob episodes in the midseason hiatus because I compared an MLP episode to a Spongebob episode and people got curious. I showed them "how bad it could get." And then people pointed me to other episodes and I took a look at them and... well now here we are. James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, was and is a movie guy. Ranting and raving about an old game was just a short series of movies in his career until they hit it big. Derek Alexander, the Happy Video Game Nerd, was/is a music guy. Ask any internet personality what they thought they were going to be doing, and none of them will say "be an internet personality." That's not to say that I don't love animation; I do. If I didn't, I never would have even started, but my past experiences keep me honed in on certain aspects of the overall product. I need a cohesive story to be engaged. I do love things like ''Fantasia and find the movie beautiful, but that's not something I'd watch in my spare time. I need a coherent narrative, because that's what's important to me and my interests. I think that animation has very useful advantages when telling a story over other forms of media. For example, stranger concepts and fantastical premises fit in animation better than most other medias. And in an animation you can truly exaggerate actions and emotions without becoming melodramatic and torturous (if you use the medium correctly). There's a reason that I'm planning to have my magnum opus be a cartoon and not say a video game. On the other side, my attachment to a good story does help me forgive things that other people might not - which is one of the reasons I reviewed "Sorry, Wrong Ed" instead of say... "If It Smells Like an Ed." The latter episode has a well-structured story and a genuinely good mystery that kept me invested until the end. There are different schools of thought when it comes to animation, putting the value of the writing everywhere from the pinnacle of what drives the show, damn the animation (South Park) to an after thought at best (generally, storyboard-based cartoons heavy on slapstick humor - things like Ed, Edd n Eddy or Ren & Stimpy). And I've got my own level on them. Keep in mind, I was really into shows like Avatar and Samurai Jack, where if a character broke their leg, it would stay broken and that would be a continual hindrance for the rest of the episode. Those tended to be my favorite. BoJack Horseman is my favorite cartoon of all time for a reason. That's not to say I don't find the quality of the actual animation unimportant. That's not true at all. When animation works in harmony with story, it does create what I find the best works in the medium - movies like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and once again Samurai Jack with how it plays the general tropes of animation - like the positive-negative space fight in the episode "Samurai vs. Ninja." A show with a perfect harmony of great animation and great writing is The Amazing World of Gumball. The animation uses so many techniques and uses them all flawlessly, while the writing goes above and beyond, deconstructing every single medium that it's in - playing the fact that it's a television show; playing with the fact that it's a cartoon; and playing with the fact that it's a sitcom. Paying special attention to the writing does help me enjoy (the good) things more. For example, Perfect. The animation doesn't very well convey that the weird teacher demon thing is actually Courage's insecurities manifested. But the context cues - which I'll admit, should be a little bit more out in the open - help bring that episode to a special kind of life and make it a lot deeper. I'm not a perfect... anything really. I have made my fair share of mistakes, and I'm probably going to make many in the future. I can only hope to get better. Would I have done certain things differently, knowing then what I know now? Absolutely. And I'm sure there's still a lot of growth to come. There are a lot of younger things that I wish my younger self knew. A big one is "never assume that the person you're talking about won't hear you. Especially on the internet." Even if they don't/can't/won't hear you, nothing good comes from pretending that they will never hear you. It led me to my biggest mistakes and my biggest disgraces. Another one is "try to be more approachable" which is something I think I still have a lot of problems with. People have noticed when I recorded me talking with my friends on Skype in a recent video, they found that I was a lot more easy-going and casually laughing. People tend to assume that all of the yelling and screaming is who I am in real life, but it's not. I won't say it's entirely an act, but there is a lot of exaggeration. Like I said... I've just had a lot on my mind lately. Just thinking about the past. And thinking about the future. Category:Miscellaneous